The news reports were frustrating. 

Their headlines, usually drunk on drama, lacked precision and meaning. 

“Trump comes inches from death”.

Do these journalists know how the body works? I perform a Google search. In normal ears, the external cartilage, or auricle, is no more than two centimetres from the head.

The evidence from Butler, Pennsylvania – copious amounts of Trumpian blood – suggests that twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks came way closer than “inches” to achieving his aim. 

Indeed, the assassin-manqué, already dead, may yet change the world. 

***

What is it about young men that can produces such volatile behaviour? And why is it that the first flush of male adulthood can intersect so explosively with the American psyche? 

This niche imagines itself the National Ingenue, emblem of an America of open road, untrammelled freedoms, and an insistence on personal destiny. Its United States is distinguished by a cocktail of entitled actualisation, which amounts to personal, manifest destiny.

There is a problem with such young, American men.

*** 

Lee Oswald was 25 years old when he shared a ride into Dallas on November 22nd 1963, throwing a rifle concealed in brown paper into the back of the vehicle. His place of work, through happenstance, provided a bird’s eye sightline of Dealy Plaza, which lay on the route of the presidential motorcade later that day. Lee had seen it published just one day previous. 

Youth is primed to seek out opportunity; less inclined to question the object on which its heart is newly set.

In the case of Oswald, his superior marksmanship, and the empty lunchtime space across the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, sealed the deal. 

President Kennedy was assassinated.

Within two days Oswald would also be murdered. And all before the loner “patsy” reached his 26th birthday. The latter phrase of self-description would create grist for the ongoing interpretation of exactly what happened, and why.  

***

Ronald Reagan grazed destiny in 1981, when 25-year-old John Hinckley used the president as a patsy to gain the attention of Jodie Foster, an actress with whom he had become erotically fixated. 

Hinkley arrived into the DC area by bus with other plans, but noticed the President’s movements published in the evening paper. 

Young men are eternally suggestible. And Hinkley had a gun.

In an un-mailed note to Foster, written two hours before committing his famous crime, Hinkley laid out his logic.

“The reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you”. 

On his release from a DC mental health facility in 2022, he would reflect back on his decisions.

“I have tremendous remorse for what I did in 1981… I was a mixed-up, confused 25-year-old.”

***

Bystanders outside the security cordon surrounding Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13th 2024, were the first to know something was amiss. 

A man was observed, bear-crawling the shallow incline of a white, industrial roof overlooking the President’s podium. A slung rifle was visible, flexing across his body as he advanced.

The angle and aspect of the roof meant that Secret Service snipers, positioned at a height on the building opposite, could not see twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as he arrived to his position. But those Trumpeter bystanders could. 

The ex-President of the United States was in the early minutes of a stump speech, speaking of problems at America’s southern border. He stood perhaps 150 metres, as the bullet flies, from the vantage point which Crooks would dominate, albeit for less than 5 seconds. 

People below Crooks started calling out, and pointing. Their concern, heard on video snippets, builds in volume to hollering.

Some seem clear on what they are witnessing. But the scenario feels clichéd. Just like the movies. Is it a parody of cataclysm, or cataclysm itself? It takes some seconds to clarify what’s going on. Police and security rush about. And Trump continues to speak.

Crooks’ opportunity, like many a troubled young man before him, lies in the in-between. He takes aim, and fires several rounds, before being ‘neutralised’. 

“I watched them snipers blow his brains out”, described one witness. 

*** 

We don’t yet know the motivations of the bear-crawling twenty-year-old who committed his crime a convenient one-hour drive from his suburban home. We do not yet know the role of impulse and opportunity in his decision. 

But we do know that within the torrid young lives of a strain of American masculinity lies the crux. Alas, it is the fissure that keeps on giving. 

***